Posting exactly the same article to

AP articles are filtered the same way as an article you wrote. It applies the same to the New York Times as an article index.

The "duplicate content penalty" is how we describe one of Google's many search result filters. When someone does a search and multiple copies of the same content (whether it's an article you wrote or an AP news article) match, only one copy is shown in the results. This keeps result pages from being filled with hundreds of copies of the same text, which would make Google far less useful to the searcher.

It just means that if you submit 5 copies of your article to different sites, the one with the highest PR is going to show up in search results and the other copies won't. They'll get much less traffic as a result, but at least one copy will still come up.

If you search for the title of an article in quotes or a big piece of text, you can force Google to show multiple copies since that's all it finds, but otherwise you should be able to prove the above with a few simple tests. It's exactly how they wrote they deal with duplicate content on their blog over 2 years ago.